DETROIT LAKES — New Becker County Veterans Service Officer Anthony Mastin was born and raised in Detroit Lakes, but his military and law enforcement career has taken him far afield, past some deadly near-misses and through some heartbreaking tragedies, before bringing him home to Becker County again.
He graduated from Detroit Lakes High School in 1987 and graduated from the Detroit Lakes technical college with a degree in biomedical electronics repair.
He could have earned a good living, it was a sensible career choice, but the closer he got to graduation, the more he realized his heart wasn’t in it: He wanted a career where he could better help people in need.
“I always wanted to do law enforcement,” he said. “So after I graduated, I joined the Army, active Army military police.”
He started out at the Presidio Army Post in San Francisco, then was transferred to Germany, where he served for four years. “The people were nice,” he said. “The older generation liked us, they appreciated what we did after World War II.”
Then he was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, and in 1994, he deployed from there to Haiti with other military police officers as part of the Uphold Democracy operation.
The country was a mess, and he said the corrupt and brutal Haitian police and military were largely disbanded and replaced with new officers. His job was to train them. His unit helped set up police stations and train the new Haitian police officers in American law enforcement skills and patrol techniques.
He was there for about nine months, then it was back to Fort Benning for a short time before being sent to Fort Carson, Colorado, where he spent about a year as military police patrol supervisor and desk sergeant.
In 1996, he was offered a position with the Colorado State Patrol in the Cortez area. “It was fun, it was a beautiful place,” he said.
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Civilian policework and military policework are “very similar,” he said. “You’re basically out patrolling, helping citizens in need, helping local police sheriffs,” he said. “There was no ticket quota, we looked for a lot of DWIs and driving under the influence of drugs. If you can keep impaired drivers from driving down the roadways, you’re making everybody safer.”
He helped motorists with flat tires or who ran out of gas. “We had a device that could transfer gas from my car to theirs,” he said. “Just a couple gallons so they could get to a gas station. The State Patrol was an awesome organization to work for.”
He was there for two years and was friends with most of the local law enforcement officers in the Cortez area. That made it all the harder when a violent bank robbery went down that involved those officers.
He missed that bank robbery, barely, because he had decided to move back to Detroit Lakes with his family, after his father and father-in-law both had heart attacks within a relatively short period of time.
Mastin and his wife also had a young son at the time, and “it felt better to be closer to home,” he said.
He had applied to the Minnesota State Patrol and was invited to attend its academy. He resigned from the Colorado State Patrol and got back to Minnesota a week early because the person who bought his house in Cortez had asked to move in a week early.
“It’s kind of a crazy story,” he said, but that bank robbery happened on what would have been his last day on the job as a Colorado state trooper. Five officers were shot after responding to that bank robbery, and two of them were killed — including the state trooper who was filling in for Mastin that day, he said.
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He still gets emotional talking about it. “Things happen for a reason,” he said. “I personally think somebody has been looking out for me.”
As it happens, the Minnesota State Patrol training academy was canceled that year due to state budget cuts.
So Mastin was out of a job, with no immediate prospects. A few days later, he ran into the then-owner of the Detroit Lakes Perkins – who knew him from college, when Mastin had worked as assistant kitchen manager at Perkins – and offered him the vacant kitchen manager job.
But he cautioned that he only planned to own Perkins for two more years, when he planned to retire and sell his privately owned Perkins franchise to the Perkins corporation.
After the bank robbery shooting in Cortez, Mastin felt he needed a break from police work. “My life was in a whirlwind,” he said. “It gave me time to figure out what I wanted to do.”
He worked at the Detroit Lakes Perkins for two years. But when the owner sold, and Mastin was faced with having to transfer to the Moorhead Perkins and take a big salary cut, he decided to part ways with Perkins.
About that time, a nephew wanted to join the Army, and Mastin went along with him to talk to the recruiter. It turned out to be a good day for the recruiter – he ended up recruiting not just the nephew, but Mastin, too.
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“He asked me if I would consider coming back to the military — they desperately needed recruiters,” Mastin said. After doing a little research, Mastin agreed, and became an Army National Guard recruiter for Bravo Company, 136th Infantry.
“They moved me to Thief River Falls for three years, then to Moorhead for about a year,” he said.
While there, in 2004, he was involved in a tragic car crash when a woman with a vehicle full of children went through a stop sign in front of him on Highway 75.
That was a very difficult time for him, and he ended up moving to Detroit Lakes to finish his time as a recruiter. He retired from the Army National Guard in 2014.
After that, he took some time off, traveled and worked a variety of jobs in the Becker County area. In 2020, he moved with his family to Sarasota, Florida, which he loved. “I went scuba diving three times a week,” and found lots of fossils, he said. His wife worked as a nurse, and Mastin launched a successful handyman business and ran it until repeated hurricanes raised the cost of living so much that life there became very difficult.
With his parents getting older and having some medical issues, Mastin and his family decided to move back to Minnesota to help them out. “I got here a year and a half ago,” he said. “My dad died in October. At least I got to spend a year with him before he passed away.”
“I’ve always enjoyed helping veterans and doing veterans programs,” he said. “Being local, I know a lot of people. I’m hoping I can help the veterans and help the community.”
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He is now focused on multiple training sessions over the next few months to get up to speed and certified on the equipment and software programs used by county veterans service officers in Minnesota. The county is also hiring an assistant veterans service officer, and Mastin is deeply involved in that hiring process.
“The training must be done, but I am the new county veterans service officer in town, and I am honored to serve county veterans and the family of veterans to the best of my ability," he said.
Mastin replaces former Becker County Veterans Service Officer Matt Erickson, who was gone on deployment for about a year, and recently left to pursue opportunities in the private sector.